Sydney University pro-Palestine camp shows topsy-turvy world of warriors for radical chic
On Anzac Day, after bathing in the warm and reassuring camaraderie of the dawn service at Bondi, I went to the Sydney University students’ pro-Palestine ‘occupation’ site to see for myself. I witnessed a mob that inverts logic and consistency.
Like children with matches in a summer bushland tinderbox, the pro-Palestinian protesters at our universities seem to have no idea about the lethal forces that are their playthings. Islamist extremism, anti-Semitism, Arab grievance, Jewish defiance, great power politics and social cohesion in Western liberal democracies like our own are all in the mix.
These are tensions not easily grasped or resolved by undergraduates looking for the revolutionary cause of their era. When they bandy around terms like “Israeli genocide” and “apartheid state” or talk about a colonial power usurping the rights of an Indigenous people you know that facts, history and context have no place in their considerations.
Politicians of the left in the US, Britain and here do little to chastise or correct them because they are in the ugly electoral game of courting the ever-growing Muslim vote, holding off ever more radical leftist rivals, and appealing to the young and impressionable. National values and interests play second fiddle to the spineless mathematics of political power.
At Columbia University in New York City, which has led the way in what has become a global campus campaign, Jewish students this month were advised to stay away from classes, and now the whole university has switched to a remote learning model. Even one pro-Palestinian protester, Linnia Norton, seemed shocked at the hatred they had unleashed, telling a reporter; “There were people outside of campus one time with signs that said, ‘Death to all Jews’ – that is awful and nobody should be having to experience that on their campus.”
The Students for Palestine protesters at the University of Sydney are unashamedly derivative, posting on Instagram that they have been “greatly inspired” by the movement at Columbia. They have chanted “Intifada, intifada”, cheering on Palestinian armed uprisings that have visited terrorism on Israel repeatedly since the 1980s, taking thousands of innocent lives.
Whatever your view of Palestinian aspirations and the Israeli government, no rational approach to this issue should ignore the human reality. It seems incomprehensible that these privileged students could see the Hamas atrocities of October 7 last year and the horrible war they were designed to trigger and use those events not to condemn and campaign against Hamas but to advocate the terror group’s agenda.
On Anzac Day, after bathing in the warm and reassuring camaraderie of the dawn service at Bondi, I went to the Sydney University students’ “occupation” site to see for myself. From a distance, the whole thing looked like topsy-turvy world to me. These are students who promote and enjoy sexual liberation, gender equality, embracing of gays, bisexuals and transgender people, imbibing of alcohol, and no doubt free expression, democracy and individual rights; how could they offer comfort to the Islamist extremist terror group Hamas, which would readily throw them off a rooftop on any of those counts?
And yes, like topsy-turvy world, this mob inverts logic and consistency. This is a movement that deliberately targeted Anzac Day for “glorification of war” while it refuses to condemn Hamas for instigating and continuing a war with unspeakable barbarity against civilians. The protesters do not even denounce Hamas for the way it deliberately triggered war: slaughtering 1200 people, including babies, women, teenagers and the elderly, while taking nearly 250 hostages for raping, torture and murder, with about 130 unaccounted for more than six months on.
As I walked into Sydney’s tent city I saw a sign scrawled on the walkway declaring this was the “Gaza camp”. There were Palestinian flags, tents emblazoned with “From the river to the sea” (the obliteration of Israel as a slogan), a stand for Socialist Alternative with a copy of Introducing Marxism on display, and a lot of young people milling about in Palestinian keffiyeh – clearly this lot had skipped the unit on cultural appropriation.
Unusually for people running a demonstration, they were very shy. I asked two women why they had “from the river to the sea” on their tents and they denied knowledge or responsibility for the tent daubing – I am certain if I had stuck around they would have denied it three times before the cock crowed.
Another group of students told me they would speak with the ABC or SBS but not with The Australian, and when I asked them why I saw no posters or banners calling for the release of hostages they broke eye contact and scattered without response.
When the protesters gathered for an open-air meeting, in keeping with their “people’s movement” schtick, they said they could not speak freely while I was watching and asked me to leave. Before leaving I posed the hostage question again – they offered no answer.
Why are the hostages conscientiously unremembered as a political inconvenience? Like the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, these protesters want to wipe away October 7.
It troubles me that young students can turn their backs on a family such as the Bibas family. I witnessed videoed brutality and terror from October 7 that I would dearly love to unsee, but a video of the Bibas family, without overt violence, haunts me like no other, and should haunt the free world.
On the morning of October 7 last year at kibbutz Nir Oz, Shiri Bibas, 32, is seen holding her two beautiful red-haired boys, Kfir, 9 months, and Ariel, 4. (We’ve since learned Shiri’s husband Yarden had been dragged off bleeding from the head and is believed to be dead; Shiri’s parents later were found murdered). In the video Shiri appears to be uninjured but is surrounded by Hamas terrorists telling her what to do and where to go, and she is confused and terrified, clutching her boys. Her blameless terror and fear for her boys are a violation of humanity.
This mother and her boys remain unaccounted for, with some reports suggesting they were alive early this year, and Hamas claiming they were killed later by Israeli attacks. So cowardly and depraved is this abomination that the best we can hold any slim hope for is that this woman and her two boys somehow have endured almost seven months of horror.
The only person at the university who would engage in a meaningful discussion with me was Josh Lees. He is not a Sydney University student but clearly had a leadership role at the camp.
Lees is an organiser of the Palestinian Action Group and a writer for Red Flag, the newspaper and website of Socialist Alternative which claims to be the nation’s “largest Marxist revolutionary group”. So much for student autonomy.
“What’s your view of Hamas?” I asked Lees. “It’s not about Hamas, we’re opposing the genocide in Gaza,” he diverted.
And so it went, repeatedly, with this professional activist refusing to condemn Hamas or its bloodcurdling terrorism. After five unsuccessful attempts for a view on Hamas I switched to asking about his view of what Hamas did on October 7. “My view is that nothing that happened on October 7 can possibly justify a genocide that’s been taking place,” he said.
I persisted, suggesting the point was not what the events did or did not justify but more simply, did he have a view about 1200 people massacred and up to 250 taken hostage. “You wanna ask me about something that happened six-and-a-half months ago?” he deflected.
“One human being to another,” I implored. “Do you have no view about what happened on October 7?” Silence. “You can’t find it in your heart to condemn the atrocity that occurred on October 7?” Nothing.
Eventually he muttered in rhetorical tone, “Israel can defend itself, but the Palestinians can’t?!” This was a sickening characterisation of the October 7 bloodlust as self-defence.
The conversation was abhorrent and pointless. Pushed on hostages Lees claimed Israel had 10,000 hostages – facts do not matter on this campus.
These protests at some of our most prestigious universities are deeply disturbing and metastasising across our public debate. Sydney University trumpets three values of “trust, accountability and excellence” and it champions diversity, yet it tolerates a protest demonising Jews and Israel, and encouraging armed uprising by Islamist terrorists against a liberal democracy.
This, while the Islamist extremist threat re-emerges on our shores, pointed among the young. And the type of Islamist society promoted by Hamas and like-minded groups is the most brutally intolerant version known to humankind – anathema to the claimed values of any university or Western democracy.
Columbia University proclaims its mission cannot succeed without “thoughtful, rigorous debate” that is “free of bigotry, intimidation and harassment”. But right now Jewish students and staff are being physically intimidated and blocked from attending classes, so that most are too fearful to attend.
The Sydney students chant “Intifada” and “Revolution” on social media and claim Israel is “murdering tens of thousands of people”.
The university says it wants all its students to be able to express their views and it has beefed up security as a precaution – vice-chancellor Mark Scott seems to have switched from the staff-run collective model at the ABC to a student-run collective on campus.
In The New York Times, Columbia professor John McWhorter wrote this week about the constant drumbeats and chants of “river to the sea” and the impact on his Israeli and American-Jewish students.
He pondered about what would happen if the protesters instead were chanting “anti-Black slogans or even something like ‘DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion) has got to die.”
“Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilised exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence,” McWhorter argued.
“I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weeks-long campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
McWhorter said social media was playing a role in overheating political protests but that was little comfort to Jewish students. He said what began as an “intelligent protest” had developed into an “uncompromising fury” and “a form of abuse”.
Once places of inquiring minds and the contest of ideas, universities are becoming hotbeds of ignorant conformity and enforced political homogeneity. The weak and woke agenda that has infected them is replete with paradoxes: the radical activists preach tolerance but demonise Jews; they demand rights for women but claim men can have babies; they oppose war but make excuses for bloodthirsty terrorism; and they support free expression but engage in digital censorship and physical intimidation.
At Sydney University the students congratulate each other on social media, order pizzas and stir-fry through Uber Eats, and camp in nylon tents with security guards watching over them as they somehow endure autumnal overnight temperatures plunging from warm to cool. As they nod off, they must eradicate from their minds any thought of perhaps 100 Israeli hostages who, almost seven months on, will be beaten, raped or tortured for another night in the tunnels beneath Rafah – if they are lucky.
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